


Edge

by Lavender_Seaglass



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Canon Setting, Circle stuff, F/M, Grief, a slight mystery, custom names, fade stuff, the death of wisdom, the existence of sex is acknowledged
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-06
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-30 03:06:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12644886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavender_Seaglass/pseuds/Lavender_Seaglass
Summary: While he's gone, there's a baffling case of missing things.





	Edge

**Author's Note:**

> So, this one is more of a character study than anything. Normally I don't really like to do what amounts to a write-up of canon content but, in this case, the characters have different reactions to what's going on, and the beats of the relationship are altered too by the more tenuous pace.

Lost things are what she’s talking about. Gone, vanished, more than simply misplaced. Having had to listen to so many consistent complaints, Josephine has come to believe in a spreading plague of disappearance.

‘I just don’t get it,’ she says with an emotive sigh, and it sounds as though she’s feeling more defeated than she’s been in a while. Outwitted by something she’s thinking is less mundane than common carelessness. ‘The Comtesse claims it’s not just her heirloom hairpins either. She’s missing a novelty ear pick of carved antler, and a snuffbox said to be magicked by a Tevinter magister to smell like the Golden City.'

The Inquisition’s lady ambassador has flushed in the process of delivering her plaintive soliloquy. She and the Inquisitor had been the last ones to leave the war room tonight, lingering behind the others to bring up between them what might seem like a trifle, but a matter which increasingly is becoming a problem. They had discussed it, and they walked at a surprisingly contemplative pace until they arrived in front of Josephine’s fireplace. The warmth of a fire was inviting, always is inviting, in the halls of Skyhold. And its radiant light highlights the wholesome gloss of Josephine's elegantly twisted hair so very nicely. It’s something that’s hard to not notice, even when she cannot be wholly invested in the present and its proceedings.

Althea listens as Josephine talks. Without her usual accessories of paper and quill and portable desk, her manicured hands are often active in a gesture, a flurry of flourishes in the air, or adjusting some fold of her functionally ornate clothing. Even when she’s paused--for a breath, a thought, to search for a proper phrase--she’s prone to leaving her mouth slightly open, the tip of her tongue poised. Ready to resume, efficient and effective as always.

‘But the strangest part is she claims her maid, who’s otherwise level-headed and dependable, has lost all of the household’s pins and needles. The hairpins, the sewing needles, clothing pins. It seems like a lot to lose, doesn’t it? I mean, too much. It seems there must be a thief. But--’

And Josephine cuts herself off, aware even before she had said it how it sounded, it was excessive of her to indulge in this speculation she must have wanted to voice for a while now, if she actually let herself let it slip. Now, with a crumple in her smooth features, she is deliberating over her own words. Maybe she is fulminating herself over an assumed misstep. Maybe she thinks she misjudged the closeness of their relationship that’s so suddenly and recently become one between a superior and a subordinate.

For several seconds, Althea says nothing. She simply smiles at her advisor, whom she considers a friend. Quiet encouragement is the best that she can manage, when she’s doing her best not to let her attention slip away into the void of something else that is edging in on her mind.

‘But that’s insane, right? Who would steal things like that?’

‘You’re right,’ Althea says, and here, for which she is grateful, comes her will to fully engage again. It’s a warmth spreading in her shoulders and her chest and a pleasant urgency fanning into her stomach. The chance to be able to help is one of the most compelling things she knows. ‘I can’t imagine any human taking them. Or elf.’

Though she does have a good idea of who might be up to something. Not thievery, to be sure, nothing so insidious is intended. ‘But I’ll look into it for you. It wouldn’t do to have our guests thinking they might be haunted by a particularly roguish ghost.’

For a while they linger on this topic and its causal tributaries that flow together to form a conversation. They exchange thrills and chills and unexaggerated exclamations of ‘no’ and laugh at fanciful suspicions of scandals.

And it’s a relief, this distraction found in a trusted companion. She hopes Josephine is personally getting something out of it too. Something more than a promise to address a problem that already has a solution.

 

**.**

 

Under the stars and one newly risen moon, she makes her way to the ramparts. She is alone on this endeavour. Calling it a walk, thinking of it as a promenade, this is a task she has set about, but it doesn’t feel like a chore. And she tells herself this, over and over, and over, until it feels more like a choice she’s made than a willing amble down a sidetrack that’s a desperately needed respite from her frantic pacing in well-worn circles.

On her own--save for the occasional scout who passes her by, they’ve all long since learnt from their commander to think of their job as more interesting, and more important, than sights like the Inquisitor out on a nocturnal stroll--Althea does not carry a torch or lantern. Instead she musters a tendril of her inherent power and shapes it into a gentle wish. Into the Fade she sends it, and from the Fade comes a response. A humble, curious wisp is summoned. Anything grander would have required something more interesting to be proffered , something more from her, but that suits her just fine. (Though, things being what they are, it wouldn’t have taken too much more from her to beckon them to her. Where once she had to coax spirits to respond to her, now they watch her, their curiosity almost always pressing in against her as they push towards the power that dwells within her left hand. Sometimes, when the mark flares, she can feel the Fade around her, and she can feel the accumulating gravity of hundreds.)

This wisp’s company is easy. It floats above her shoulder, no questions asked, either from it or the others who might see it. Magelights are not an uncommon sight around mages, and everyone, whether friend, admirer, or enemy, knows what the Inquisitor is. When she had accepted the mantle of leadership, she had done so as a Thedosian mage.

The light she walks in is gentle. Once in a while the wisp, with its own strands of sentience, flits ahead and casts its soft glow on the place where she will step next. This behaviour she considers a manifestation of playfulness, a mannerism that anyone would deem a charming characteristic in someone they considered a person. Maybe its cognisance barely registers in any quantifiable way, but the wisp seems self-aware. And that’s enough for Althea. She considers it a living, feeling, needing thing.

So come along, then, and help me find what I am looking for.

As she walks the ramparts flecks of crystal catch the light of the slight spirit, like so many dull stars pulled up from the depths and revealed in the earth’s split-open flesh. Paling in comparison to the real things so numerous and breathtaking above her, nonetheless these terrestrial asters are a detail she likes to see in the stone. Like a nuance or subtlety that might be missed if a sentence is read too quickly, a flavour lost in a fine pastry devoured too readily. And they are something to focus on. All along the way they sparkle dimly, until she arrives at the western-most tower. The chaos caused by neglect and abandoned detritus is still abundant within its walls. There are many hiding places suitable for smaller things inside of it, if that was something one needed.

Carefully, for her own safety and the sake of the deepening nighttime peace, Althea picks her way from where the door reluctantly scrapes open in its hinges, to a thin slit of a window set into the opposite wall. Once there she rummages among sheets palled with dust and dirt, all draped over unused and slightly rotted furniture. Another reason why she prefers the company of a wisp to a brighter, harsher light, is that its luminescence does not render her nightblind. Even if it pulses and shimmers and varies in intensity, it never shines such that it afflicts her. She can stay totally aware of what is going on in the dark around her.

So she sees what it is that she picks up and puts down. She sees that what she seeks is not here, and she moves on. Makes her way back out the way she came, manoeuvering deftly with the grace she has been training to move with. Every day she receives lessons to learn how to be this way in the world, along with the instructions she’s receiving in the art of leading from the frontline. There is a lot to learn, and a lot to get used, for her to be able to step up and out of her natural place behind the vanguard, as her ability to be a commanding presence burgeons. Althea isn’t a natural leader--her teacher has told her as much even if she didn’t need to hear it to know it’s true. Her position as a Knight-Enchanter who steps first into battle even before her first barrier has flared into glorious, glinting being, it’s something that she’s still coming into.

And he had approved of it. He had told her he did, when she came to him to tell him of her decisive choice to pursue this as her specialisation. His hand had come to rest on his forearm, he had taken a step towards her, she remembers the softened set of his eyes. Grey eyes gleaming, above the regal ridges of his cheekbones. The look he regarded her with had kicked her heart into a frenzied rhythm, the irregular vibes of which had echoed in her head and drowned out her thoughts for several heated seconds, and the heat had spread in her body, along her neck, into her face, into her bones, she had felt as if she might be floating. Seeing someone so fondly proud of her is something she hasn’t been able to experience so very often. And that it was _him_ looking at her so--how could she not experience a shattering burst of happiness. Not since Lydia had someone had simple pride in the actions she'd taken.

He had also told her of origins of the discipline she would dedicate herself to. Elvhen, of course, the arcane warriors were. It seems to her sometimes that anything that has any real value has profound--and purposefully forgotten--connections to them. Though instead of lamenting this potential counterfeit and exploitation, he had still told her he approved and praised the choice. It fit her. And, he had said, they would be happy to know that their art had found use and purpose long after they themselves had vanished.

He said that. And he had smiled.

It’s hard for her to not take him, wise and knowing as he is, at his word, but a worrying possibility did niggle at her for a time. Was he just saying that? Did he really not mind? Hadn’t humans treated him even more poorly than his own kind?

A shame, she thinks now as she travels the ramparts of her fortress, that she had doubted him at all. Even if he meant something kindly, he would not say something just to mollify her. He would not disrespect her so, could not, not when he looked at her the way he did. Not when he had trusted her to help when she offered it in that horrendous moment. The relief in his voice told her everything she needed to know about how deeply his respect ran.

Or at least it does in hindsight. Several days without word from him, she has had little to dwell on but the memories of the last minutes they spent together in that harrowing, hellish encounter. She has tried to think of other things, many other things, but this is what comes to mind when she rallies herself not to become lost in the encircling trap of her concerns. These memories, painful as they are, are like bright, bright beacons for which she is grateful, leading her out of the mists of her mind to the firmer grounds of self-loathing with their fiery anchors awful to behold.

 

**.**

 

The nights without him she has dreamt.

As she should. In case--in case of something. If he wonders, if he is lost, if he needs to just to feel there is someone out there who cares.

She does not mean for her dreams to be such lurid, unhinged things. She does not mean for him to look to her in his favoured realm of the Fade and see an overly vivid reminder of a personal tragedy she did not suffer. Yet this is what it is: dry grass underfoot, dry earth and dry wind, even if there is a brisk chill in the air. The acrid tang of smoke and the sickly smell of burnt grease and charred meat. A dark plume to indicate that their end was hot, very hot, a rising temporary testament to wrath and fury, his grief. Aching hands, hair free from her braid and in her watering eyes, a pain in her chest where magical blowback had erupted after an interrupted spell.

And his sorrow heard. A language she may not understand, but words which she remembered, would have carved into her own flesh if it would have helped. For when she visits this memory over, over, over, she sees the same thing, her own weaknesses and deficiencies and her inability to do anything for him. She’d known how to break the binding, sure, because she had happened to read the right thing once. But what had that done for him? What had it accomplished? Rendered his goodbye into a proper one that could last a little while? Given him the chance to be asked to bring a cessation of suffering?

Where was the mercy in any of that? What was the point of any of it--or of her?

Here she was, here she is, here she will be always in the Fade: standing behind him, meters away, witnessing him unable to save someone he loves.

 

**.**

 

Eventually, she finds what she is looking for. As she knew she would: it was just a matter of having enough time to look in enough places. The pins and valuables and several other shiny objects are found in an errant pile of autumnal leaves in the small courtyard off the side of the main hall. As close as this place is to the heart of matters it is almost always quiet and sees relatively little foot traffic. It’s a peaceful place. A place which she likes, that brings her a private joy like a harmless, but clever, little secret.

Cole is there when she discovers the objects. As soon as she touches one of them, he is sitting on the waist-high wall the pile has been raked against.

‘Why these things, Cole?’

‘Pretty possessions are nice, and the valuable ones are rare, their meaning comes from the memories in your mind, the stirrings that were made in your heart. A warm breeze in spring ruffles your hair--how long has it been since I felt fresh air? I guess losing my sister’s pin over the edge wasn’t so bad after all.’

As if she expected an answer. Still, Althea tries for some clarification. Sometimes it’s just a matter of asking the right question, of adjusting just a bit so the picture is no longer hanging crooked. ‘So you took everyone’s pins?’

‘No. I hid them. You like pretty things and possessions that mean things that are personal. And you want to be together. Pins hold things together--why can’t there be something like that for us?’

‘Because people are more complicated than that.’ It wasn’t even a rhetorical question from him, but still she answers as she keeps her hands busy with sorting through the things. Bull’s hip flask, a silverite broach that clinks like glass against other bits of wrought metal, a thin bit of bone engraved with breathtakingly delicate care: everything lit up by the wisp still buoyant at her shoulder.

Cole moves, and he is standing behind her. ‘Can I help you?’

Gently holding other people’s things in her hands, she doesn’t turn to regard him as she considers.

Then, honestly: ‘I think, Cole, other people need you more than me.’

‘But I’m not asking them.’

‘Because they aren’t here?’

‘Because I’m asking you right now. It’s easier to breath by myself but not when I’m alone. Eyes I can see watching me during the day, eyes I cannot at night. Crowds all around, interest in me, but I’m alone. Waiting is suffocating even when I do my best to breath. My heart is burning.’

‘All right, well,’ she says, her voice steady, her hands trembling, unutterably glad that they are the only ones out in this cold, deepening night. ‘If you want to help me get these things back to their owners, I would appreciate it.’

‘Give me something to do. I’m tired of sleeping if it means remembering.’

 

**.**

 

It’s not that it’s ended, it’s that it never began in the first place.

In the Circle, if there was something you desired to do with someone, you did it. There were consequences if you got caught: something to make you remember to be more careful next time. But nothing so bad as to make you regret a little bit of pleasure.

Not moving on when you were done--that’s what actually got you into trouble.

So the fact that he won’t touch her, sometimes won’t even look her in the eye, that he obviously has to restrain himself, is what confuses her most of all. If he wants to, she’s willing. She has been taken by plenty of others who wanted this of her. And she has done her own taking in her time.

But he also won’t let her touch him either.

Not since they walked together in the Fade, shoulder to shoulder in a place he professed meaningful to her, and told her that she had changed everything. And with such apparent wonder in his voice, as he even then worked through in his thoughts just how thoroughly she had affected him.

Turning to him, meaning to enquire and invite him to expand those thoughts into a personal conversation between them, she had reached out and touched his wrist. She wanted him, yes, but that was not her intent. She wanted to give to him, not take from him.

Then he’d looked at her, and she’d lost every meaningful thing to say to him in the grasp of his vice-like intensity.

There was passion in that look, and that was something she had never had to deal with.

Not from another person. Not for another person.

How would she ever be able to give him so much in return?

She had let go of him, and he had let her pull back away to a distance of comfort. Then he told her to wake up.

 

**.**

 

She tries to sleep that night. Eventually, after exhausting herself with shadowing through the halls with Cole, she does, for a little while. But, for once, she is given the solace of no dreams.

 

**. . .**

 

In his own time, he comes back.

To the Inquisition. To her.

‘Thank you, Inquisitor.’

‘For?’

‘Allowing me to gather my thoughts.’

‘I’m just glad you’re back.’ Then, ‘did you find what you were looking for?’

Two weeks he was gone. Standing here, before her, he is tired, he is slouching, he has mud stains and dust of several hues covering his entire person. Yet he seems better to her now. Not just calm and polite and considerate as he’s known for being, but lighter. Lightened? What it is, is that he’s had a small conciliatory hope to hold to, and in the time he has had to contemplate it, it has leavened his mood. His outlook is not as embattled with the ignorance which is lethal to him and all that he holds dear. The ignorance which is seemingly endemic to this world.

The voice he answers her with is solemn in its softness. It’s a serious thing which he shares, and deeply considered in the time in which he has been away from her. ‘I found traces of Wisdom stirring in the Fade. She will return, in time, but she will not remember me.’

His friend is gone. Any return of hers is not a true one, at least as far as his relationship with her is concerned. That is something that has been lost to him. And, if not forever, then for a time he evidently feels is too long to be anything but a significant defeat, the finality of his tone is clear even when he speaks of the future she may have.

Althea stands there with him. The first to greet him after his appearance in the valley was reported to her hours before he made his way up to the castle proper. He hasn’t been back long. They are quiet for a time, somehow able to find a still moment in all the important work that is being done in Skyhold to save the world from a threat that has endangered everything. The sound of soldiers drilling are distant, the smells of the kitchen and its contents are not tempting, a light breeze brushes waves into the shallow pools left alone by the sun for most of the day in the great shadow of the imposing main hall.

If this is it, she thinks, at least it’s in such an unexpectedly intimate moment. It’s one she won’t mind revisiting.

  
And, rather than say anything that she’s been saying over and over to herself in the days spent without him, something that might convince him to stay, what she ends up telling him is spontaneous and felt truly in the moment of its saying. Inspired by the solidity of his person, the fact of him, the silence that she thinks speaks to his weariness. If he were anyone else, now would be the time in which she would reach out to him. Touch would be something that would bring comfort.

‘I’m sorry for the loss of your friend, Solas.’

Then, as if the contents of her hopes and fears for him are displayed before him, he shakes his head. He cannot dismiss his grief, and she would not ask him to. She would only that he not be ground down under the weight of it. The heaviness of it which bears down even on his voice. ‘Thank you.’

He shuffles his feet, and he does move in place, under his burden, but he is not turning away. And that’s when she knows he isn’t leaving. Wouldn’t leave, even if she asked him to, even if there’s a possibility that he would be better off far away from her and the accompanying danger. Maybe there’s something else she could do, to force him away if--

But. Overwhelmed by relief, she doesn’t have the will to entertain such irrelevant thoughts. They are unneeded, gratuitous, speculation, diversions from that which has been the subject of an unrelenting subconscious focus. All she has want for is to reach out for him in a way that he will accept. She would be there for him in a way that will work for him, in any way that she can.

‘Well, if you ever want to talk about it, I’m here for you. I’ll listen. Even if I don’t understand, I’ll try to.’

And _that_ must come as a surprise to him. Despite her lowered voice, he seems impacted by what she has said. Another shifting of his weight, signs of efforts to too-late capture and hold the effect her words have on him. Whatever it is, he feels it. A sensitive, intelligent man, who knows an impossible amount about a world he would prefer to spend his time dreaming about. No-one is around and the feeling of privacy between them isn’t just an ambiance. No-one else has heard what she has said to him.

So, he’s not embarrassed by her.

The tilt of his head is more about awe, she realises, than it is about nerves or overstepped boundaries.

‘You must forgive me. It’s been some time since… I wasn’t alone. It may take some time for me. Being able to turn to someone is a privilege I will have to get used to.’

‘Well, you don’t have to earn it. You already have me.’

He takes a step forward, comes towards her, is moving. There is gratitude and much more--complicated things, things too much for her to press him on now, it would be careless of her, in his state--in his tired eyes. Bright, but tired. Ringed by black that shades into anemic blue.

The space still remains between them, and it’s a wordless response from a usually eloquent man, but it’s still a step. It’s one that she knows is in the right direction. For the both of them.

They turn around and walk to the steps together. Each one cut into the side of the hill is a bit closer to the main hall, a little bit higher up the mountain. Ascending, they move in pace with each other, and it is seen that he has returned to her side. She must part ways with him when they reach his room. If he is to wash up and rest she cannot linger, she knows this, so she’s all right with leaving him on his own this time.

Still so happy at his return, her reluctance is hardly noticeable from the heights at which she’s currently floating. All the same, as she is about to turn away from him, has said goodbye and expressed her earnest desire to see him again sooner rather than later, he has one last thing to add.

‘I take my commitments seriously.’

And he does, she knows. All of them.

 

**. . .**


End file.
